The Allure of Naturism

I started out by thinking that I would have restrict myself to writing about the bikini pictures of Julia Roberts, Naomi Watts and Rihanna. Then a new US television series came along, 'Don't Trust that B**** in Apartment 23,' where the female lead does her ironing in the nude. I can't watch US television where I am, so I can't actually tell you how much was shown and in what context, though the title sounds negative. Then there was Melody Thornton - a former member of the Pussycat Dolls, the media tell me - who showed up at some Hollywood event wearing a see-through dress and nothing underneath.

Naturism? No, just different shades of nudity.
Then there came Allure. A magazine I don't follow, but which has the custom of asking famous people - women, of course - to show up naked for artistic pictures. The person honored with the magazine cover was nobody else but our 2011 Celebrity Naturist of the Year - German supermodel and Project Runway host Heidi Klum.
Also featured in the Allure naked photo list are actress Debra Messing, Maria Menounos and some other celebrities I was not familiar with, and Taraji P. Henson.
Miss Henson was nominated for an Academy Award for one of my favorite movies of the past few years, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where she played Brad Pitt's mother. Apart from that, she comes across as someone who likes nudity like a naturist would.
Miss Henson says she likes walking around in the nude in her New York apartment and asks whether she's on a nude beach before taking her top off.
Miss Henson, let me tell you this. You can take your top off at any beach you like, because being topless - wearing a monokini as Europeans say - is not nudity. You can do so at any European beach. At a nude beach, you can take everything off and be totally free. We would love Taraji P. Henson to visit Europe and spend at least a day on a real naturist beach, without the paparazzi in tow.
The Oscar nominee comes closest to the spirit of naturism. The allure of being naked is not exhibitionism or press coverage, it is the feeling of being completely free, of feeling the sunshine and the water on your skin, of being close to nature and to yourself.
Congratulations to Allure, since, while not being a naturist magazine, you might have done a service to naturism by launching this project.
To be a true naturist, you don't have to be a celebrity, you don't have to have a body like Heidi Klum or Taraji P. Henson, you just have to be yourself and feel comfortable as a human being in the middle of nature.
Turning away from Allure to my own picture and the ones in the two previous postings: they hail from a tourism brochure around 1991 for the region of Istria, then in Yugoslavia, now Croatia. The country has been a destination for mass naturist tourism since the late 1960s.

Ready for Spring and Summer 2012? (2)

Same country, same year, same brochure. At first sight, traditional holiday pics: coastline with blue sea, resort hotel with swimming pool, on the beach taking surfing classes.
You can only spot this is a naturist resort when you take a close look at the lady and find she is not wearing a bikini, not even sandals. She's a naturist spending a holiday at a naturist resort.
I wish I were in her place during the summer of 2012. Wouldn't you?

Ready for Spring and Summer 2012? (1)

Spring is almost here - in Western Europe we still have near-freezing temperatures from 0 to 10 degrees Celsius - and summer is around the corner, so what better time now than to prepare with a little teaser?
Naturism and nude beaches seem like a recent invention, but in some parts of the world, they have been around for quite some time.
As you can tell, this is a picture from a publication, but it's not even a naturist publication. The pictures were shot at one resort, in one specific country, quite some time ago.
No responses asked, no prizes awarded, but could you guess where and when that picture was taken?
I will give you the answer a couple of days from now, after I upload a second picture from the same publication.
If I were doing the guesswork, I would be able to identify the country, because I visited it several times myself, and because of its typical coastline just visible in the fragments of pictures on the far left and top.